Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,091]

21 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

When two countries are at war it is a certainty one was just visited by the US - Nelson Mandela

 

Fact Check: Nelson Mandela Didn't Once Say, 'When Two Neighboring Countries Fight … the USA Visited One'

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-nelson-mandela-didnt-023000147.html

A claim that anti-apartheid activist and former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela once said that "when two neighboring countries fight each other, just know the USA visited one" has been circulating online since at least September 2024 (archived).

For example, the rumor appeared on Instagram and Facebook in October, on Facebook in November and on X in December (archived).

However, various posts featuring the quote drew comments from users who said it was incorrectly (archived) attributed (archived).

In fact, there is no evidence that Mandela ever produced the quote. No credible news outlets have ever reported him saying it, and the quote did not appear in searches of newspaper and other online archives.

Neither the South African government's Mandela speech archive nor the United Nations' collection of Mandela quotes yielded any evidence of the former politician saying those words.

There was also no credible evidence of the quote being attributed to another speaker, nor evidence of the quote existing prior to Dec. 5, 2013, when Mandela died. Therefore, we have rated this quote as misattributed.

Snopes has reached out to the Mandela Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by the late activist, and Martin Meredith, a biographer of Mandela, for comment on whether they have the quote in their archives. We will update this article if we receive a response.

We have previously fact-checked other quotes supposedly attributed to Mandela, including: "We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians," and: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."

Sources:

Archive.org. (2024). Internet Archive TV NEWS : Search Captions. Borrow Broadcasts. [online] Available at: https://archive.org/details/tv?q=%22When%20two%20neighboring%20countries%20fight%20each%20other [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].

Google.com. (2024a). "When two neighboring countries fight each other - Google Search. [online] Available at: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=fdf7728f28b59cda&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB1138GB1138&q=%22When+two+neighboring+countries+fight+each+other [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].

Google.com. (2024b). 'When two neighboring countries fight each other just know the USA visited one' - Google Search. [online] Available at: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22When+two+neighboring+countries+fight+each+other+just+know+the+USA+visited+one%22&sca_esv=3ddc15aac6af2d0d&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB1125GB1125&tbs=cdr:1 [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].

Newspapers.com. (2024). 'When two neighboring countries fight each other, just know the USA visited one.' - Search - Newspapers.com Basic Archive. [online] Available at: https://www.newspapers.com/search/results/?feature-rs=true&keyword=%22When+two+neighboring+countries+fight+each+other%2C+just+know+the+USA+visited+one.%22 [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].

Un.org. (2015). Nelson Mandela's Life & His Statements Speaking Out For Justice. [online] Available at: https://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/legacy.shtml#OnRacialDiscrimination.

www.britannica.com. (n.d.). When did Nelson Mandela die? | Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/question/When-did-Nelson-Mandela-die.

www.mandela.gov.za. (n.d.). Speeches by Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. [online] Available at: http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/.

[Vesper 30,091]

The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Wokeness

Woke culture emerged from elite shifts in identity politics, abandoning the economic roots of social justice.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-rise-and-likely-fall-of-wokeness

In the past few years, a cluster of books and articles has appeared analyzing “woke” as a cultural phenomenon. Even though there is no consensus around its meaning, most analysts agree that it is in essence a mutation within “identity politics.” Woke pursues social justice primarily on the axes of race, gender, and sexuality, much as identity politics has, but in a more militant and intolerant way. Whereas identity politics was always narrower in its ambitions than the more traditional left, it tended to peacefully coexist with both socialist and liberal traditions. Its woke descendant takes a hostile stance to both and is more strident in pressing its social and cultural goals. It is far less hesitant to restrict speech and ascribe motives; it is more skeptical, even pessimistic, about overcoming cultural or racial barriers, and more draconian in narrowing the range of debate.

The rise of woke culture has elicited a great deal of discussion and debate. Much of this has focused on its redefinition of progressivism. Less common has been an analysis of its social roots and institutional propellers. But if the phenomenon is to be properly explained, rather than simply described, some analysis of its genesis and social foundations is needed.

On the Left, woke culture is often presented as an aggressive pursuit of social justice, while on the Right, it is seen as a deformation, a result of the Marxist takeover of civic and educational institutions. But as I will argue, it is neither. In contrast to its left-wing defenders, I will suggest that it expresses a profound narrowing of what counts as social redress; and against the Right, I will show that its success is due to the retreat of the radical Left, not its hegemony. Woke culture is the organic ideology of a narrow elite, drunk with power, and backed by the key power centers of American politics.

The Path Not Taken

One of the more interesting developments in the scholarship on the civil rights movement is its rediscovery of the movement’s radical and labor-based foundations. A steady stream of historical and social scientific research has shown that while political equality was always a central goal of the movement, its leaders never endorsed separating political rights from economic rights. This flowed from the fact that many of the movement’s most important organizers came out of the socialist and communist traditions. Indeed, for people like Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Tom Kahn, and others, advances in the political realm would be severely restricted if Black Americans remained mired in poverty. Civil rights were therefore taken to comprise merely one component in a larger ensemble of social rights, at the heart of which was a focus on jobs, housing, health care, and education. In other words, the agenda for racial justice would only be effectuated if it was embedded in a wide-ranging economic redistribution.

This focus was not limited to the inner circle around Martin Luther King, Jr. It was an expression of a broad political current that had grown in social influence since the 1930s. Led primarily by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and a radical Black intelligentsia around the Communist Party and civic organizations, racial justice was, to a significant extent, identified with the needs and aspirations of working-class Black Americans. It was understood that the extension of formal equality would only have limited significance in their lives if they lacked access to basic economic goods. As King once said, “We know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” King and his associates did not fold up the movement once the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. For them, the law was only one step in a longer struggle for the full gamut of rights for Black Americans.

This ambitious social democratic vision of racial justice could only move forward on the strength of its labor and activist base. But by the early 1970s, that base was severely weakened, and then it slowly dismantled over the next decade. In contrast, precisely because of the institutional momentum created by the civil rights movement, a variety of political and social programs did foster a growing professional and elite stratum of the minority population. By the 1980s, there was a significant layer of Black and brown politicians at the local and national levels as well as a substantial growth of minority-owned small businesses—all firmly connected to the Democratic Party.

As the influence of labor waned and that of minority elites increased, there was a natural shift in the goals and ambitions of the racial justice movement. Whereas its earlier incarnation had expressed an agenda tied to the interests of working-class Blacks, by the end of the 1980s, ideas of racial justice came to reflect the interests of more elite sections. And because of their proximity to the Democratic Party, it was these interests that were articulated into policy proposals and electoral campaigns.

From Economic Rights to Identity Politics

As a result of the changing political balance, by the time of the first Clinton administration, racial justice had morphed into what we now call “identity politics.” This was race politics largely shorn of its earlier commitment to redistribution and economic rights, and more focused on removing barriers to upward mobility for women and minorities. Its focus narrowed to the reduction of disparities within the upper echelons rather than between economic classes. But while this narrower conception of racial justice had become hegemonic by the turn of the century, it had not yet transmuted into what today is known as woke culture. On the one hand, it was viewed by many as remedying some of the blind spots and errors of the left, in which problems of discrimination had not been given their due. In this respect, it was seen to be filling out a progressive agenda that still had room for redistributive ambitions, rather than displacing those ambitions outright. Furthermore, even while this incarnation of race politics was critical of a more universalistic stance, it did not yet castigate the latter as inimical to the eradication of racism. In other words, while it was advancing an agenda catering to particular groups—minorities, women—it did not reject political agendas aimed at citizens as a whole or the general population. Rather than an outright rejection of universalism and redistribution, identity politics was often presented as a corrective to universalism’s blind spots.

The delicate balancing of the narrower conception of antiracism with the earlier, grander ambitions of the Civil Rights era reflected the political orientation of the Democratic Party. In the years from the Clinton presidency to the first Obama administration, Democrats moved steadily away from their working-class base, leaning more on suburban and college-educated voters. The increasingly explicit embrace of markets, the retreat from redistributive goals, and the constriction of social justice to antidiscrimination initiatives and culture wars—all of these reflected the party’s greater reliance on its affluent base, to the detriment of its traditional anchor in unions and the working class. But party leaders also understood that even while they were demoting the position of the labor movement in the party, they could not afford to expel it all together. And so some vestigial nods to broad-based economic rights and antipoverty measures remained visible into the Obama presidency.

Sanders, Floyd, and the Elite response

By the end of the second Obama administration, the Democrats seemed to have worked out a viable political strategy for the foreseeable future. They had crafted an electoral coalition based primarily on the suburbs and the college-educated population, with a firm foundation in communities of color who were carefully steered by elite minorities into a reliable voting bloc, together with sufficient support from the working class to make the numbers work. All of this was put to the service of a largely neoliberal program, albeit with a few very thin cushions to soften the blow of market forces on the population. The candidacy of Hillary Clinton was to be the apotheosis of this process—a handing of the baton from an African American (man) to a (white) woman, symbolizing the ascension of historically underrepresented groups from the margins to the very apex of power.

The promise of this model was dramatically upended by the explosive emergence of Bernie Sanders in 2016. In his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, Sanders articulated a redistributive agenda, which not only overturned almost all the nostrums embraced by the Democrats since the Clinton era but also elicited a level of mass support nobody in the party had anticipated. Sanders’s foregrounding of economic issues in his campaign threatened to disrupt what the party’s leaders viewed as both a viable and a desirable political model—one that was acceptable to their monied donors and also had a stable electoral coalition behind it.

Clinton, in a now-famous speech of February 16, 2016, she delivered in order to repel the Sanders challenge, wondered if breaking up the banks could address historical issues of discrimination and cultural exclusion. Asking rhetorically if economic measures could ever resolve problems of racial and gender discrimination, she effectively proposed responding to Sanders by resorting to elite identity politics. More subtly, her response signaled a shift in the party leadership’s attitude to economic demands. Whereas its centrist leadership had hitherto tended to at least give a rhetorical nod to redistributive demands, now it chose to calumniate them outright. Rather than being the left-wing of the possible, identity politics was mobilized to foreclose possibilities for more radical change.

Although Sanders lost his bid, his campaign improbably continued to gather steam leading into the 2020 primaries. And his astonishing success in the early phases of the primary elections led to a further consolidation of the party against its populist wing. In what appeared to be a calculated move, all of the candidates save for Biden and Sanders withdrew from the nomination leading into Super Tuesday in 2019. All that was needed then was for James Clyburn, a representative from South Carolina and a major Democratic power broker, to throw his weight behind Biden: He did on February 26, 2020, which announced the fatal alignment of the party’s Black leadership against Sanders’s populist insurgency.

By the spring of 2020, a top priority of the Democratic Party was to sideline its Sanders wing to the greatest extent possible. Indeed, Biden was at least as concerned with distancing himself from Sanders as he was with confronting Donald Trump. It was in this context that the horrific murder of George Floyd transfixed the nation. It was a moment when the pressing need for racial justice was brought to the top of the political agenda, while there still existed a possibility of anchoring that agenda in the ambitions that had steered the civil rights movement. It might very well have been the moment when a movement unleashed by the brutal murder of a working-class Black man intensified the calls to integrate economic rights into a movement for racial justice. But the power balance between the different social forces generated a predictable outcome.

Led by Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the corporate community threw its weight behind the narrower vision of identity politics the Democrats had been nurturing for some years. Addressing the problem of systemic racism was interpreted to mean an aggressive pursuit of diversity in the professional ranks and more militant policing of the cultural sphere. The momentum that had been gathering for universal redistribution, reaching back to the Occupy Wall Street campaign, rapidly receded. Whereas the Sanders wing of the party had seen its racial justice program as part of a larger panoply of redistributive mechanisms, the party now found a vehicle to separate antiracism from antipoverty and redistribution. Universalistic programs were now denigrated as an explicit rejection of racial justice, rather than a means towards that end.

The Slide from Identity to Woke

This was the moment when, on matters of race, identity politics’ slide into woke accelerated at a dizzying pace. Its components had already been incubating, of course. There had already been a baseline level of anti-universalism, intolerance, cancelation, and professional-class dominance in the years leading up to 2020. To highlight this moment is not in any way to suggest that wokery was invented in that year, but it is difficult to deny that it was catapulted then to a place that it had never been able to occupy before those fateful months. It was at this point that the elite’s capture of the antiracist movement was consummated.

For minority professionals and managers, the windfall was massive. There is still a dearth of systematic evidence, but the research that has been done points in the same direction. The two domains in which professionals benefited the most were probably universities and the corporate sector. All this while funding for community colleges, public housing, etc. continued to flounder. Under the banner of antiracism, the floodgates were opened to institutions catering to a Black and brown elite, while the indifference to institutions catering to working-class minorities continued.

The essence of this elite approach to antiracism was to turn attention away from social structures and group relations and toward individuals and psychological attributes. This marked the complete inversion of the perspective that had driven the civil rights movement’s progressive leadership. After the passing of the Voting Rights Act, both Rustin and King had turned their efforts toward achieving massive economic redistribution. But now, under the banner of the new antiracism, attention narrowed to two fundamental issues: the degree to which elite institutions were racially diverse and the need to change individual psychology and individual behavior in pursuit of an antidote to “systemic racism.” All of this served to turn attention away from the economic and political power of corporations over their employees and the minority population more broadly, to their internal constitution and culture, especially the diversity of their managerial corps.

So too in education, anxiety around racial justice rapidly translated into a focus on the internal culture of academic institutions—syllabi, degree requirements, the content of scholarship— and the diversity of the managerial corps and faculty. While there were a few voices arguing that the vast majority of minority students were enrolled in community colleges and public universities, where the major issues were funding and retention, these were drowned out by a laser-like focus on affirmative action and faculty diversity, especially in the elite institutions.

All of this amounted to a windfall for the minority professional classes, under the banner of eradicating “systemic racism.” Whatever its moral implications might be, it simply reflected the power balance—not between white and non-white America, but within non-white America. The chain of events leading up to Floyd’s murder created a political opportunity for emerging Black and brown elites, and these capitalized on it with remarkable vigor.

All this was justified by the intellectual culture that prevailed inside academia. The most significant factor here was the weakened condition of liberal nostrums, under the hammer blows of post-structuralism, postcolonial theory, and various forms of race essentialism, all of which were either skeptical of, or hostile to, enlightenment principles. The emergence of anti-enlightenment philosophical trends in the 1980s associated with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others, was devastating to the two foundations of modern progressive thought, liberalism and socialism. Steeped in the anti rationalism of the post ‘68 philosophies, university culture came to reject those very values that had sustained academic freedom in the post-war era—the commitment to rational debate, the pursuit of scientific progress, and the commitment to free speech. Meanwhile, the remarkable growth of an essentialist approach to race and ethnicity, which downplayed economic divisions within racial groups while elevating the economic and social chasms between them, obscured the fact that woke antiracism was catering to elites within American minorities because the very existence of divisions within races was being downplayed.

The Future of Woke

The slide from identity politics into wokeness had two factors behind it. The first was a kind of elite panic at the emergence of a genuinely populist movement behind Sanders. The second was an understandable anxiousness within the broader culture to address racism after Floyd’s murder. Both of these reasons have, by now, abated substantially. Most important, the insurgent populist campaign within the Democratic Party today is considerably weakened, if not marginalized altogether. While the Sanders left continues to have some influence, there is no sign of its potentially upending the Democratic electoral coalition. On top of that, even if matters of race continue to be salient in the political culture, they no longer hold the public’s attention the way they did five years ago. This means that the propulsive forces that pushed identity politics into its more militant and intolerant forms are no longer as strong as they were.

There is genuine concern within the Democratic Party and public institutions that the illiberalism and authoritarianism associated with wokeness have fueled a public backlash. And this backlash has empowered political and social groups that have always been hostile not just to wokery but to the entire civil rights agenda. Under the protection of Trump, figures like Elon Musk, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and others have been emboldened to make inroads under the banner of opposing wokeness into many of the substantive reforms that the movements of the ‘60s actually achieved. Democrats are thus much less committed to promoting woke culture than they were in 2021. With the threat of a populist wave now receding on the political horizon, it is clear that the business community no longer feels it necessary to absorb the personal and organizational costs of wokeness.

With none of the real power centers giving it any real support, it is likely that wokeness will retreat to a more conventional style of identity politics. Certainly in the corporate world the die has been cast to expunge the practices most directly associated with wokeness—DEI, anti-racist training, etc. But even in academia, the elevation of antiracism to a central place in the educational mission is unlikely to continue. Indeed, the more likely outcome is a rollback of longstanding measures, like protections for minorities and the disabled, which conservatives now see as achievable under the banner of anti wokeness. What seems firmly out of reach, given the current balance of forces, is a return to the social democratic version of anti-racism. That will require a great deal more political and organizational change.

This essay was first published by The Ideas Letter

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

15 minutes ago, Vesper said:

 

Fact Check: Nelson Mandela Didn't Once Say, 'When Two Neighboring Countries Fight … the USA Visited One'

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-nelson-mandela-didnt-023000147.html

A claim that anti-apartheid activist and former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela once said that "when two neighboring countries fight each other, just know the USA visited one" has been circulating online since at least September 2024 (archived).

For example, the rumor appeared on Instagram and Facebook in October, on Facebook in November and on X in December (archived).

However, various posts featuring the quote drew comments from users who said it was incorrectly (archived) attributed (archived).

In fact, there is no evidence that Mandela ever produced the quote. No credible news outlets have ever reported him saying it, and the quote did not appear in searches of newspaper and other online archives.

Neither the South African government's Mandela speech archive nor the United Nations' collection of Mandela quotes yielded any evidence of the former politician saying those words.

There was also no credible evidence of the quote being attributed to another speaker, nor evidence of the quote existing prior to Dec. 5, 2013, when Mandela died. Therefore, we have rated this quote as misattributed.

Snopes has reached out to the Mandela Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by the late activist, and Martin Meredith, a biographer of Mandela, for comment on whether they have the quote in their archives. We will update this article if we receive a response.

We have previously fact-checked other quotes supposedly attributed to Mandela, including: "We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians," and: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."

Sources:

Archive.org. (2024). Internet Archive TV NEWS : Search Captions. Borrow Broadcasts. [online] Available at: https://archive.org/details/tv?q=%22When%20two%20neighboring%20countries%20fight%20each%20other [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].

Google.com. (2024a). "When two neighboring countries fight each other - Google Search. [online] Available at: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=fdf7728f28b59cda&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB1138GB1138&q=%22When+two+neighboring+countries+fight+each+other [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].

Google.com. (2024b). 'When two neighboring countries fight each other just know the USA visited one' - Google Search. [online] Available at: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22When+two+neighboring+countries+fight+each+other+just+know+the+USA+visited+one%22&sca_esv=3ddc15aac6af2d0d&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB1125GB1125&tbs=cdr:1 [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].

Newspapers.com. (2024). 'When two neighboring countries fight each other, just know the USA visited one.' - Search - Newspapers.com Basic Archive. [online] Available at: https://www.newspapers.com/search/results/?feature-rs=true&keyword=%22When+two+neighboring+countries+fight+each+other%2C+just+know+the+USA+visited+one.%22 [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].

Un.org. (2015). Nelson Mandela's Life & His Statements Speaking Out For Justice. [online] Available at: https://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/legacy.shtml#OnRacialDiscrimination.

www.britannica.com. (n.d.). When did Nelson Mandela die? | Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/question/When-did-Nelson-Mandela-die.

www.mandela.gov.za. (n.d.). Speeches by Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. [online] Available at: http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/.

Well he missed out then, because its fucking true 🙃

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

Starmer - The Establishment engineered his path to PM because he’s more authoritarian than many Tories. Out of 650 MP’s, Starmer was the only one invited to become a member of the US neo-con's Trilateral Commission set up by the Rothschilds, which believes we have too much democracy and the elites should have total control.

He's a symptom of the UK's increasingly authoritarian lurch.

[Vesper 30,091]

Naomi Klein: ‘What They Want Is Absolutely Everything'

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/naomi-klein-what-they-want-is-absolutely-everything/ar-AA1E8UtG

Wherever corporate power is running roughshod over culture, the climate, the economy, or our politics, progressives can count on Naomi Klein to provide a clear-eyed assessment of the damage and to offer pathways to resist with hope, rather than cower in despair. A social activist and public intellectual, Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine - about how right-wing elites leverage moments of crisis to advance unpopular economic agendas - and This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate, an examination of how free-market dogma is accelerating the threat to our planet's survival. Her most recent book Doppelganger limns how conspiracy culture is shattering our notions of shared reality. 

Klein recently co-authored an essay for The Guardian, sounding alarm about the dark worldview of politically insurgent tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Klein views these men - who are guiding Donald Trump's presidency - as abandoning any positive vision for our collective future, and instead retrenching in preparation for a dark, nearly end times-level social collapse, from which they and other elites emerge unscathed, and all powerful. "The governing ideology of the far-right in our age of escalating disasters," she writes, "has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism."

Rolling Stone reached out to Klein for a conversation about Trump's unique shock doctrine - as well as his administration's confounding war on science and basic research. Klein is a professor at the University of British Columbia where she directs the Centre for Climate Justice. (You can almost forget she's not American until you hear the pop of a hard ‘a' when she says "against.") Klein also offered her views on the recent Canadian election, and the legacy of Pope Francis, who invited her in 2015 to participate in the launch of his encyclical calling for a shared reverence of the glories of our Earth.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

For readers who are unfamiliar, can you quickly unpack the thesis of The Shock Doctrine?

In its simplest terms, the shock doctrine is just a strategy to advance deeply unpopular - and profitable - ideas. It's using a moment of crisis to advance policies that benefit elites, but that tend to be opposed by most voters. 

snip

[Vesper 30,091]

TANK vs TESLA "We've crushed fascism before and we'll crush it again" - ⁠WW2 veteran Ken, 98, in the tank

https://bsky.app/profile/ledbydonkeys.org/post/3loltwljm2k2t

 

[Vesper 30,091]

[Fernando 6,585]

 

 

Edited May 9 by Fernando

[Vesper 30,091]

UK-US trade deal 'isn't worth the paper it's written on', Nobel Prize-winning economist tells Sky News

The UK's "first-of-its-kind" deal with the US includes reduced tariffs for key industries such as British steel, but American economist Joseph Stiglitz has told Sky News why he "wouldn't see it as an achievement".

https://news.sky.com/story/uk-us-trade-deal-isnt-worth-the-paper-its-written-on-says-nobel-prize-winning-economist-13365655

A Nobel Prize-winning economist has told Sky News the recently announced UK-US trade deal "isn't worth the paper it's written on".

Sir Keir Starmer and Donald Trump announced the "first-of-a-kind" agreement with a live, televised phone call earlier this week - and the British prime minister hailed the deal as one that will save thousands of jobs in the UK.

But leading economist Joseph Stiglitz has told Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips he "wouldn't view [the deal] as a great achievement".

"Any agreement with Trump isn't worth the paper it's written on," he said, pointing out the president signed deals with Canada and Mexico during his first term - only to slap them with hiked tariffs within days of returning to the White House this year.

"I would view it as playing into Trump's strategy," he said.

"His strategy is divide and conquer, go after the weakest countries, and sort of put the stronger countries in the back."

The scramble to secure a UK-US trade deal was sparked by Mr Trump's 'Liberation Day' announcement last month, which saw the president hike import tariffs for multiple countries and subsequently send global markets crashing.

China initially faced tariffs of 34% and when Beijing hit the US with retaliatory rates, a trade war quickly ensued.

The US and China now impose tariffs of above 100% on each other, but representatives from the two countries have this weekend met for high-stakes negotiations.

With its response to Mr Trump, Beijing "made it very clear that the US is very dependent on China in so many ways," Mr Stiglitz said.

"So they're beginning now to negotiate, but from a position of strength."

Asked if he thinks the UK should have focused on its relationship with the EU instead of the US, Mr Stiglitz said: "Very much so.

"My view is that if you had worked with the EU to get a good deal, you could have done better than what you've done.

"If it turns out, in the end, when you work it all out, Trump is unhappy, he'll run. If he's unhappy, I pray for you."

Edited May 11 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

Israel calls for gas chambers in Gaza

 

[Fernando 6,585]

U.S. and China agree to slash tariffs for 90 days in major trade breakthrough

 

[Fernando 6,585]

So how's that end of the world stock market going?

Told you guys it was a good time to buy. 

Even the hated Tesla, nice move up lately. 

When the world is hating and fearing the big techs you know the bottom is near. 

Ah I love the contrary play to the world when it comes to the market. 

[Vesper 30,091]

America Has Never Seen a President This Corrupt

Trump’s brazen use of the White House to advance his family businesses should be one of the biggest scandals in the country’s history.

https://newrepublic.com/article/195202/trump-corruption-qatar-plane-middle-east-gulf-tour-family-business

 

Given the tumult in the Middle East, it makes sense that the first foreign tour of President Donald Trump’s second term would be to the region. The situation in Gaza is dire: Israel plans to “conquer” the territory and displace millions of Palestinians, who are facing famine and renewed military bombardment. The Trump administration may have reached a ceasefire with Houthi rebels in Yemen, who allegedly have promised to stop attacking U.S. ships in the Red Sea, but Israel is still bombing the Iran-backed militia. And the administration is negotiating with Iran itself about the fate of its nuclear program. Trump has sounded an optimistic note about those talks, but should they fail, he has made it clear that the United States could bomb Iranian facilities and possibly trigger a regional war.

But Trump isn’t visiting the Middle East to push for peace or really to do much diplomacy at all. Instead, his visit to the Persian Gulf is, one Arab official told Axios, all about “business, business and business.” Yes, Trump is seeking investment in America: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi during the president’s first term, has already pledged $600 billion. But one increasingly gets the sense that it’s not America’s business that Trump is really there for: It’s his family businesses. This swing through three Gulf states, which kicked off on Monday, is the clearest and most damning instance yet of his approach to governance in his second term, where official business and personal business are fully intertwined.

Trump’s trip was tainted by massive, historic corruption even before it began, when it was revealed that he would accept a “palace in the sky”—a luxury Boeing 747-8 worth $400 million—from Qatar, which he plans on using as Air Force One. “So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Dems are World Class Losers!!!” But the proposed gift was criticized not only by Democrats but also by Republicans, including Senator Rand Paul, podcaster Ben Shapiro, and far-right loon Laura Loomer. Plus, the Defense Department isn’t really getting the gift: Trump has indicated he plans on transferring the jet to his presidential library foundation at the end of his term, which likely means he can keep using it after he leaves office.

There are no indications that the jet—which Qatari officials have said has not been officially gifted—is part of an explicit quid pro quo. That hardly matters, though. Qatar is buying favor with the president in an act of deep and brazen corruption. Trump wants to be treated as a king, and Qatar is playing ball. Will Qatar be rewarded by favorable treatment by the U.S. government for as long as Trump is president? Of course it will. This is exactly how Trump has always wanted to govern—via personal relationships, in which foreign leaders and business magnates grovel before him. This is exactly how he’s governing during his second term.

Trump’s businesses have extensive ties in the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar (as well as nearby Azerbaijan). It would be shocking if Trump did not discuss his own business interests while encouraging investment in the U.S.—indeed, it is quite clear that he sees no difference between the two. For Trump, the business of America and the Trump family business are one and the same.

Trump’s visit to the Gulf is following in the footsteps of his sons, Eric and Donald Jr. The pair have been jaunting across the region drumming up business, and in recent weeks “announced new overseas business deals involving billions of dollars, including a luxury hotel in Dubai, a high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a new golf course and villa complex in Qatar,” according to The New York Times. But the pair are most notable for introducing cryptocurrency to their family’s business portfolio. They are currently pushing to take public American Bitcoin, a crypto firm they co-founded, which would allow investors to directly finance a company with close ties to the president.

Since assuming office, Trump has backed pro-crypto legislation and shuttered a Department of Justice unit devoted to investigating its use in fraud, money laundering, tax-avoidance schemes, and other crimes—all actions that benefit his own increasing financial stake in the industry. Most outrageously, he has repeatedly pushed crypto as a means of buying direct access to him. $Trump, a meme coin launched three days before his inauguration, has recently soared, thanks to the president inviting 220 of its top investors to dine with him in what he called the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world.” That ploy led to a windfall—investors spent nearly $150 million buying the president’s meme coin—in a weeks-long sale that ended on Monday. Not all of the invitees are known, but they include a number of prominent cryptocurrency investors, including Justin Sun, a major Trump donor who saw a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation close after he spent $75 million on $WLFI, a separate meme coin peddled by the president during the 2024 campaign.

Sun, who was born in China and is currently based in Hong Kong, is just one of many foreigners cashing in on the ability to influence the president. As with the Qatari jet, the absence of a quid pro quo is immaterial. These people are buying access so they can lobby the president on crypto regulation. The real estate and bitcoin ventures being pursued by the presidents’ children vastly exceed—by a tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, at least—the lobbying work done by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which Trump and many others on the right spent years insisting was a massive scandal.

For Trump, this is what being president is all about: He is entitled to a massive windfall and a luxury jet because he is in charge of the world’s most powerful country. He explained the jet as a simple perk of being the commander in chief of the American military. “I think it was a gesture because of the fact that we help, have helped, and continue to, we will continue to, all of those countries: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and others,” he said on Monday. A $400 million jet he will use when he leaves office is simply a perk of the job—as are lucrative real estate and cryptocurrency deals. Trump calls it a gesture, but it’s clearly something more.

What is happening now is unquestionably the biggest corruption scandal in American history. There are signs that the Democrats are waking up to it. The party recently blocked a bill to regulate stablecoin, one form of cryptocurrency, and are demanding that it include requirements barring elected officials from owning or promoting stablecoin ventures. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, pledged to put a hold on all Department of Justice nominees until “we get more answers” about the Qatari jet. In the meantime, Trump will be jetting around the Middle East making deals for himself and his children—and maybe, just maybe, for the country too.

[Vesper 30,091]

The Republican Tax Bill Screws the Working Class

Alas, if history is any guide, they’ll love it anyway.

https://newrepublic.com/article/195220/republican-tax-bill-screws-working-people

 

Donald Trump received 56 percent of the working-class vote in 2024, according to exit polls, up from 51 percent in 2020 and 49 percent in 2016. The bond between the president and these voters is sadomasochistic. The more Trump skews government policy against the working class (defined here conventionally as people who lack a college degree), the more votes Trump receives from it. Honoring this special relationship, the House Republicans’ latest tax plan (text; section-by-section summary) is the budgetary equivalent of a cat o’ nine tails. Time for a safe word. I propose bullshit.

The most notable thing about the House plan is that it doesn’t include the very modest tax increase on income above $2.5 million, from 37 percent to 39.6 percent, that’s recently been bandied about. Trump has danced around the idea of a millionaire tax, first telling Time’s Eric Cortellessa that “I actually love the concept but I don’t want it to be used against me politically,” then saying, “It would be very disruptive, because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country” (no they wouldn’t, but never mind), then finally saying, “Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!” The through line is I want everyone to think I’m for higher taxes on the rich, but for the love of God don’t do it.

Far from increasing taxes on the rich, the House bill cuts them by extending Trump’s 2017 income tax cut, which reduced the top marginal rate from 40 percent to 37 percent on income above $731,201 for married couples filing jointly and above $609,351 for single taxpayers. According to the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 65 percent of the cuts go to the top 20 percent in the income distribution (i.e., households that earn more than $153,000) and 28 percent go to the top 1 percent (households that earn more than $787,712).

Even more skewed, ITEP found, was a provision in the 2017 bill that gave a 20 percent deduction on “pass through” income: that is, income from a small business. Small businesses tend to receive favorable tax treatment because of what former TNR editor Michael Kinsley has called an anthropomorphic fallacy that small businesses are “owned by small people.” In fact, 92 percent of this benefit goes to the top 20 percent in the income distribution and 55 percent (i.e., most of it) goes to the top 1 percent. Half of the benefit goes to millionaires.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised working-class voters that he’d eliminate taxes on tips and on overtime, and the House bill includes these proposals. I argued then that these were trivial changes intended to distract from Trump’s lousy regulatory record on tips and overtime. In the case of tips, Trump wouldn’t support eliminating the $2.13 hourly subminimum wage for tipped employees and instead giving them a $7.25 hourly minimum like everyone else. The $7.25 minimum is of course scandalously low—and Trump did nothing about that in his first term. In the case of overtime, Trump extended eligibility in his first term to about one million workers; Biden set that regulation aside and expanded overtime to four million workers. Biden’s rule was blocked after the election by two reactionary federal judges in Texas. The Trump Labor Department filed an appeal, but only as a placeholder while Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer finds out how much overtime coverage the White House will stomach. In the meantime, the appeals court has issued a 120-day stay.

I noted last summer that exempting tips from taxable income would have little effect because tipped workers don’t pay much income tax in the first place. Thirty-seven percent of them earned sufficiently low incomes that they paid no income tax at all. The Joint Committee on Taxation confirms this by estimating that the lost revenue would only be about $40 billion over the next decade. Partly that’s because the tax break would expire after four years, when you-know-who will be out of office. But it’s also because tipped workers seldom earn enough income to pay very much in taxes. As expected, the tax holiday does not apply to the overwhelmingly regressive payroll tax that all workers pay. To most people, the income tax is virtually indistinguishable from the payroll tax; you typically have to earn about $200,000 to pay more in income tax than in FICA tax. Under the House plan, an existing FICA tax credit for tips would be extended for the first time to beauty parlors—but that tax credit is for employers, not employees.

Exempting overtime pay from taxable income is much more expensive than doing so for tips. It will cost $124 billion over the next decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. As with the tax holiday for tips, this one will be short-lived, expiring after four years, and workers will still have to pay FICA tax on their overtime pay. Also, you don’t get the income-tax exemption if you earn more than $80,000, which happens to be below the household median.

Trump also promised to exclude Social Security benefits from taxation, even though the median net worth for people aged 65 to 74 is more than twice that for the general population. People aged 70 and over own about one-third of the nation’s total wealth—and Baby Boomers like me, the youngest of whom are 61, own 52 percent. Hurray!

So why did Trump promise us a tax break? Because America is a gerontocracy—dominated by older politicians, yes, but also by older voters. Not dominated enough, alas, for my age cohort to have denied Trump the White House; a little-noted fact about the 2024 election was that the Republican candidate for president failed to win the over-65 vote for the first time in a generation.

Trump’s Social Security tax holiday was too expensive for the House to consider, so instead it expanded by $4,000 an existing over-65 tax deduction of $29,200 for married couples filing jointly and $14,600 for single people. None of which we over-65s particularly deserve. But the expansion is only for four years and it’s unavailable to couples earning $150,000 or more and single seniors earning $75,000. That keeps its cost down to $72 billion.

In sum: If you’re working class, this tax bill has very little for you and quite a lot for people much richer than you. Think of it as a studded collar for your next visit to the dungeon, you naughty things. But I recommend, instead, that you recite your safe word, because, really, haven’t you had enough of this bullshit?

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

 Israeli TV debate 'How to murder babies in Gaza' and tunnels under the hospitals they have bombed, the tunnels shown  are actually in Sweden.